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Backup

I was wondering why I haven’t talked about Veeam when I use it almost every day in my job, not only administering backups but doing new implementations.

Recently, I had to implement a design where I need to backup VMs in remote sites but not back up them in a centralized storage, they will be backed up on each remote site storage.

So, by deploying a VM with the Backup proxy service and also use it as the backup repository we can accomplish the goal. We will save bandwidth and increase the speed to restore and backup those remote virtual machines by using the local storage on each remote site.

Scenario

The scenario I am talking is the following, a dedicated VM with Windows Server 2016 Standard (a.k.a. W2016 STD) to act as a backup proxy and backup repository and Veeam B&R installed on the main site (the cloud we will say).

This is the high level design:

So, we are going to back up all the VMs that are hosted in the remote ESXi hosts and also save the backup data in the local storage.

As said before, in this way we save bandwidth and gain speed in the backup and restore process in case we need to perform any of it.

We will assume that we have a vCenter deployed with Veeam B&R installed. The Veeam B&R has configured the vCenter and then all remote ESXi hosts.

Implementation

The implementation is pretty straightforward, we will have a dedicated VM to be deployed on each remote site and then perform the following high-level steps:

– As a backup repository, we are going to add a hard disk to the remote VM and use that hard disk as the backup repository for the site. We will seize the capabilities of Windows Server 2016 and use ReFS as the filesystem for the added hard disk.

– Install a backup proxy service, we just need to deploy the backup proxy service from the Veeam B&R console to the VM that we are using. The backup proxy will be who processes jobs and delivers backup traffic.

So, let’s go each step!

Backup proxy service

First, our Windows Guest OS VM is joined to the domain, so we won’t have any kind of problem for resolving the name or accessing with domain account credentials.

Backup repository configuration

Basically, we just have to add a new hard disk to our dedicated VM as Thick Provision Eager Zeroed, format the disk as ReFS and finally, add the Backup Repository to the Veeam B&R Console.

In that article, it’s also explained the benefits of ReFS so, I think it’s more detailed and easy to follow it.

After we configure all the backup repositories, we will have the same amount as the backup proxies:

As you can see in the previous screenshot, the path (D:\Backups) is the disk that we added to the VM on each remote site. We have configured the backup repository to that path because, as explained before, we have a disk formatted in ReFS and it’s explained in the article.

Backup job configuration

After configuring the backup proxy and backup repositories on each site, we are ready to the last step, configuring the backup job to perform backups.

Go to Home tab and then Backup… Virtual Machine:

Now, step by step, pick a name for the job:

Proceed to select the VMs you want to backup (in our case the ones in the EUR site):

Let’s continue and in the Backup proxy, click Choose… and select the correspondent backup proxy (EUR_proxy):

Press OK and go to Advanced. Configure it like that if you want Synthetic full backups:

And then the monthly health check (recommended):

Accept and here is the summary for the backup proxy step (we will keep 7 restore points in our case):

Configure any option as you like (not in my case):

And finally, proceed with the schedule that you want after finishing the configuration for this job!

And that would be all for this remote site. We had to to the same with the other remote sites and our job will be done!

Conclusion

Finally, with this design you will be able to back up remote sites and store the backups in the local storage from each site.

If you don’t want to use a dedicated VM as a backup proxy, you can install the service on a VM that has low usage and install the backup proxy service, however, it’s recommended to use a dedicated VM which will have the backup proxy service and the backup repository (the virtual hard disk attached).